Re: UTF-8 and case-insensitivity

Neil Brown
2004-02-17T08:33:35Z

On Tuesday February 17, tridge@samba.org wrote:
>
> I also think that if the choice were given then some linux distros
> (the likes of Lindows comes to mind) would choose to run all processes
> case-insensitive. These sorts of distros are aiming at the sorts of
> users that would want everything to be case-insensitive.

This is the bit I don't understand.

Surely the value of case-insensitivity is that you can type in a
filename from memory and not worry about what case you used when you
created the file.

Yet with Lindows / MS-Windows style interfaces, you virtually never
type the name of a pre-existing file. So case-insensitivity doesn't
seem to be a win to the user.

I thought the value of a case-insensitive filenames was for
legacy applications which have been written to the WIN32 API and took
lots of liberties with "pretty-casing" filenames between readdir and
open.

NeilBrown